Owen Griffiths - Associate Artist

I am a social practice artist working with sites and communities, responding to architecture, people and place. I am interested in the critical and dominant roles that capital, the architect and the (urban) planner play in our experience of the everyday and how we address the disconnection between community, place, our environments and the forces and ideals that maintain this in-balance.

Works have included gardens, workshops, community green spaces, research based projects, exhibitions and film work. Research is centered on architectural critique, alternative community models, community / political struggle and ‘edible land’, as spaces of resistance against a normative dominance in our urban and civic landscapes. Exploring participatory and workshop models to enable community design or collaboration is an ongoing and expanding interest.

I’m interested in the role of the artist as a utopian existence; working as different characters in a shifting territory.

Owen Griffiths is Creative Wales Ambassador 2016. In 2014 he was British Council Research Fellow to the USA and in 2012 he created Vetch Veg a community agriculture space for over a hundred people in his hometown of Swansea. In 2015 he graduated from the School of Walls and Space at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. He is artist in residence at Hillside Secure Unit and National Advisor to the Arts Council of Wales for Architecture and Regeneration. Griffiths often works with long term collaborators Fern Thomas and Isabel Griffin, as well as being a part of a number of collectives, in the UK and Scandinavia.